Bees

 Bees

Bees are winged insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their role in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the western honey bee, for producing honey. Bees are a monophyletic lineage within the superfamily Apoidea. They are presently considered a clade, called Anthophila. There are over 16,000 known species of bees in seven recognized biological families. to Megachile pluto, the largest species of leafcutter bee, whose females can attain a length of.

Bees feed on nectar and pollen, the former primarily as an energy source and the latter primarily for protein and other nutrients. Most pollen is used as food for their larvae. Vertebrate predators of bees include primates and birds such as bee-eaters; insect predators include beewolves and dragonflies.

Bee pollination is important both ecologically and commercially, and the decline in wild bees has increased the value of pollination by commercially managed hives of honey bees. The analysis of 353 wild bee and hoverfly species across Britain from 1980 to 2013 found that insects have been lost from a quarter of the places they inhabited in 1980.

Human beekeeping or apiculture has been practiced for millennia, since at least the times of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece. Bees have appeared in mythology and folklore, through all phases of art and literature from ancient times to the present day, although primarily focused in the Northern Hemisphere where beekeeping is far more common. In Mesoamerica, the Mayans have practiced large-scale intensive meliponiculture since pre-Columbian times. A fossil from the early Cretaceous, Melittosphex burdens, was initially considered "an extinct lineage of pollen-collecting Apoidea sister to the modern bees", but subsequent research has rejected the claim that Melittosphex is a bee, or even a member of the superfamily Apoidea to which bees belong, instead of treating the lineage as incertae sedis within the Aculeata. By the Eocene, there was already considerable diversity among eusocial bee lineages.

The highly eusocial corbiculate Apidae appeared roughly 87 Mya and the Allodapini around 53 Mya.

The Colletidae appear as fossils only from the late Oligocene to the early Miocene.

The Melittidae are known from Palaeomacropis eocenicus in the Early Eocene.

The Megachilidae are known from trace fossils from the Middle Eocene.

The Andrenidae are known from the Eocene-Oligocene boundary, around 34 Mya, of the Florissant shale.

The Halictidae first appear in the Early Eocene with species found in amber. The Stenotritidae are known from fossil brood cells of the Pleistocene age.

Coevolution 

The earliest animal-pollinated flowers were shallow, cup-shaped blooms pollinated by insects such as beetles, so the syndrome of insect pollination was well established before the first appearance of bees.